Lyle Denniston, the National Constitution Center’s constitutional literacy adviser, looks at how the temperature of the conversation about cultural change can rise rapidly when religion gets involved.
THE STATEMENTS AT ISSUE:
“It was really very humbling to even think that he [Pope Francis] would want to meet or know me. He told me before he left, he said, ‘Stay strong.’ That was a great encouragement. Just knowing that the Pope is on track with what we’re doing and agreeing, you know, it kind of validates everything.”
– Excerpt from comments by Kim Davis, a county clerk in Morehead, Kentucky, during an interview September 29 on ABC-TV about her encounter with Pope Francis at the Vatican embassy in Washington, D.C., during the papal visit to America. Mrs. Davis is the clerk involved in the high-profile constitutional dispute over her refusal, for religious reasons, to issue marriage licenses to gay or lesbian couples in her county.
“Pope Francis met with several dozen persons who had been invited by the Nunciature [the embassy] to greet him as he prepared to leave Washington for New York City. Such brief meetings occur on all papal visits and are due to the Pope’s characteristic kindness and availability. The only real audience granted by the Pope at the Nunciature was with one of his former students and his family. The Pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects.”
– Excerpt from a public statement issued in Rome October 2 by the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the press office director at the Vatican, after publicity over the Pope’s meeting with Kim Davis had stirred controversy in America after the Pope had ended his visit to the United States.
WE CHECKED THE CONSTITUTION, AND…
In the 1770s and 1780s, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were instructing their fellow Americans on the civic virtues of religious tolerance; they felt it was necessary to religious freedom. Then and since then, the nation has had an ongoing public conversation about the relationship of church and state. Often, of course, it is a conversation about the Constitution.
In modern times, that conversation continues amid the culture wars. Seldom does a debate arise over major changes in cultural norms that does not turn into wrangling over the religious implications.
Those who follow a strict idea of separation between matters of faith and matters of government would keep the two in entirely different spheres, while those who hold their faith principles very strongly often seek to have those tenets imitated or honored by government. Perhaps most Americans are somewhere in the middle.
The visit last month to America by Pope Francis was something of a test of attitudes about these matters. He was, of course, received warmly and, in general, approvingly (although there were separationists who were upset, especially by the invitation for him to address Congress), and his public remarks touching on sensitive cultural topics sounded generic enough to permit people to read into them what they wanted.
But after he had departed, there was a new eruption in the religious dimensions of the culture wars, from a very specific incident involving the Pope. That was the revelation of the previously private encounter between Francis and Kim Davis. She, of course, has become the most visible symbol in America today of religious resistance to same-sex marriage, with her refusal – landing her in jail for five days – to obey a federal judge’s order that she, as county clerk, must issue licenses to same-sex couples.
The federal courts are still working out the Kim Davis controversy from a legal and constitutional standpoint (she has three appeals pending in the courts), but her personal notoriety continues to stir up the political and religious implications of the marriage question. Indeed, the disclosure that Francis met with her has created a wave of punditry about what it really meant. Conspiracy theories galore emerged, especially one that more conservative prelates in the Catholic hierarchy put one over on an unsuspecting Pope, setting up this meeting to create the impression that he specifically endorsed Mrs. Davis’s cause.
Mrs. Davis is increasingly adept in dealing with the publicity that surrounds her, and it thus was no surprise that she would interpret the encounter with Francis as a kind of validation of her resistance. After a few days, the Vatican resisted that interpretation, moving to give what had happened a more neutral cast. To be sure, there is no basis for thinking that Francis is neutral about same-sex marriage; he is not. But someone at some level in the Vatican saw no gain in having an impression among Americans that he had been meddling in a domestic controversy.
What the episode illustrates, perhaps more than anything else, is that the temperature of the conversation about cultural change can rise rapidly when religion gets involved. Indeed, the ability of the dueling sides to hear each other tends to become more difficult when the debate turns religious.
In such times, there is value in remembering the fact that religious tolerance – the right to be let alone in believing in a religious creed, or in not believing at all – was so central to the aspirations of those who wrote the Constitution.
Recall what James Madison said to the Virginia convention as it considered whether to ratify that Constitution: “This freedom of religion arises from the multiplicity of sects, which pervades America, and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in our society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest….There is not a shadow of right in the general government to intermeddle with religion. Its least interference with it would be a most flagrant usurpation.”
And recall how Thomas Jefferson put it more bluntly a few years earlier: “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God.”
No one expects the head of a vast religious community to endorse unbelief. But that very religious community has known bitter intolerance, and knows well what it costs.
